Last weekend the nausea started to subside. On Sunday Dan and I left to collect beetles in Utah. For the last 6 years we had never gone on a trip just the two of us. So I was pretty excited - I thought of it as a mini vacation. I figured it would be mostly driving and spending time with nets in our hands, but even that is a luxury: driving in the car and not to have kids whining in the back or even staying in a hotel without having to spend most of the night awake to make sure the little ones do not fall of the bed and that we do not get kicked and elbowed by them :).
Sunday we left home after 3 pm. We drove till 8:30 and finally found a spot where there were larvae on tamerisk and collected some. It was 10 pm by the time we found a hotel to stay.
The next morning after breakfast I felt that my eyes were not normal (the pink eye thing had been gone for a week but it came back as soon as the steroids wore off). Not only were they really itchy and scratchy but I had blurry vision also. I called and made and appointment with the eye doctor and we left the hotel to collect more beetles. During the drive I had trouble reading the road signs and I started freaking out. Is it a stroke? (having the port is great for the infusion but it can sometimes cause blot clots so it can also be scary) Do I have a brain tumor?Should we had back home right away, should I go to the ER at the nearest town? Thankfully Dan kept calm and I tried to meditate, keep my mind busy with other things, and towards the afternoon it was a little better. But instead of being a fun day I turned it into a a moody and not such a fun day. We decided to start driving back that night so we would be closer to home and on Tuesday I felt much better, my eyes were almost back to normal - so my mood was better.
The eye doctor looked at my eyes. He thinks that my eyes are/were so dry that my cornea had trouble focusing the lens. It turns out we have these glands that make an oily substance on our eye lids, so everytime we blink the oil that is produced is layered over our eye to keep that tears from evaporating easier. Well, he said that my eye lid glands were clogged/ inflamed so they were not producing that oil as they should, so my eyes were drying out easier. So now, twice a day I do warm compress over my eyes, massage to get the gook out of the glands and clean with diluted baby shampoo. Several times a day, I use artificial tears to keep my eyes hydrated. They still get pretty itchy and scratchy sometimes. My vision is better but it is not easy to read (this is the longest time I have spent typing/reading on the computer screen since last weekend). I hope that it will get better soon.
Otherwise I feel almost normal. The fatigue isn't that bad, I started having an appetite since Monday.. so I really shouldn't complain. I think I just will have to learn to deal with this chemo. With Taxol it was the neuropathy, with FEC it is nausea and dry eyes (the funny think is that in these cases your eyes sometimes overproduce tears, so I will have tears running down my cheek but still have my eyes dry).
I will go in for the second FEC next Friday, so it is actually pretty awesome that I get to spend 10 days or so feeling normal. On Friday they will check the blood cells again. Keep your fingers crossed that I will have enough white blood cells so they can give me the chemo - there is actually a drug, Neulasta, that they inject to amplify the white blood cells, but I am trying to do without it if I can. They say that neulasta can cause bone pain but the good thing is that it would keep my white blood cell count at a reasonable level. Then again I feel weird having chemo to kill "fast diving cells" and then getting a drug to make a certain type of cells divide rapidly.
OK, I better go sleep now, it is almost midnight. Night night, don't let the bed bugs bite!
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